Flights cancelled in Nova Scotia as organizations deal with global tech outage

A global tech outage led to cancelled flights, delays and payment processing issues in Nova Scotia and around the world Friday.

Porter cancels flights, passengers unable to rebook while systems offline

Andrew Sampson · CBC News · Posted: Jul 19, 2024 8:58 AM EDT | Last Updated: July 19

A sign reads Halifax Stanfield next to a board showing flight statuses. — The Halifax International Airport Authority advised passengers scheduled to fly Friday to contact their airline directly to check flight status. (Anjuli Patil/CBC)

A global tech outage led to cancelled flights, delays, and payment processing issues in Nova Scotia and around the world Friday.

The Halifax International Airport Authority said there were disruptions to multiple airlines, including Porter Airlines in Canada, and several different airlines in the United States.

Hospitals, airlines scrambling to address disruptions caused by worldwide IT outage

But the Halifax airport said its online flight status board, which had been experiencing issues, was up and running again by late morning. Passengers, however, were still being urged to check the status of their flight with their airline directly.

Many flights were still on as scheduled, but the departures board for the Halifax airport showed some cancellations for Porter, Delta and United flights.

The airport said it would provide more updates on its website and social media as they became available.

Meanwhile, in a message posted to its website, Porter Airlines said it was cancelling all flights until 1 p.m. AT due to the technology issues. By early afternoon, the airline pushed that time back by several hours, to 4 p.m. AT.

The company said third-party outages were causing issues on all areas of its website, and that passengers would be unable to rebook while these systems were offline.

"The rebooking process will take a period of time, with new flights confirmed over a number of days due to high passenger volume," the company wrote.

Further cancellations and delays were possible, said Porter.

Halifax Transit app not accepting some payments

The Halifax Regional Municipality said it was experiencing issues with the HFXGO transit app. Saved payment cards were not working, but Apple Pay, Google Pay, and unsaved cards were still going through.

Halifax Regional Police, Halifax Fire and Emergency, and the RCMP in Nova Scotia all said their services were unaffected.

A blue error screen is seen on a computer. The text reads: 'Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some error info, and then we'll restart for you.' — A blue error screen is seen on a computer at CBC's Broadcast Centre in Toronto on Friday. (Anjuli Semple/CBC)

The technology issues were being blamed on an update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, Reuters reported Friday.

The company's Falcon Sensor software caused Microsoft Windows to crash.

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," company CEO George Kurtz said in a message posted on social media. "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

The Cape Breton Regional Municipality said in an email Friday morning that it had not been affected by the IT issues.

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